Taken Away To Crazytown

I first heard of Debbie Schlussel after the Virginia Tech shootings. At a time when very little was known about the situation there, Debs heard that the shooter was being described as "Asian" and managed to extrapolate that into the idea that the shooter was a Pakistani Muslim Jihadist and that the police and liberal media were covering the whole thing up because of Bush Derangement Syndrome. If you're wondering how exactly anyone could make that leap, it's because, unlike Debbie Schlussel, you are not a paranoid racist. Schlussel is one of those people who, on 9/11, pissed her pants in fear. Most people who did that changed out of the soiled clothing but Debbie liked the damp, cool feeling so much that she now needs a steady supply of fear induced urine which is why she embraces anything that can even vaguely be turned into a narrative about evil Islamofascists hiding under our beds until they get the order to establish the worldwide Caliphate.

Naturally, she was snatched right up by Big Hollywood.

The BH articles that bear her byline include a complaint about Marvel Comics putting Barack Obama into an issue of Spider-Man, an admonishment to the director of Defiance for making an anti-Nazi movie and not an anti-Muslim movie and a rant about the Biggie Smalls biopic portraying the late rapper as a complex human being and not a mindless, savage Negro.

Her latest was an expression of her love for the movie Taken. She and I actually agree that it was an entertaining movie. I liked it for it's fun action sequences and Liam Neeson's spot-on performance. She liked it because she feels it has brought the human race one step closer to the eradication of all things Islamic. After spending a few paragraphs describing Hollwyood's love of all things Muslim...

Part of this is the ultra-PC mentality of Hollywood, which hates all religion but for Islam because so many Muslims share Hollywood’s hatred for America.

...She then writes this:

In “Taken,” retired CIA agent Liam Neeson’s daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Muslim sex slavery ring in Paris. And while the movie doesn’t outright tell us they are Muslims, the filmmakers show us several quick close-up shots of tattoos on the hands of the men who head the ring–crescents and stars, the religious symbols of Islam.

Then, there are the people who “acquire” his daughter. They are obviously Arabs, who speak Arabic, and they are Muslims–their boss is “the Sheikh” on the yacht (Sheikhs are exclusively Muslim). And for once, they are the criminal thugs, the sex slavers, the murderers–without apology or excuse.

Just the way it was on 9/11.

And here...we...go. I read this before I actually saw the movie and can now play the "Count The Factual Errors" game. It's amazing how many she was able to cram into just two short paragraphs. One of the first things we find out is that Debbie Schlussel is unable to tell brown people apart and, knowing her, probably thinks that all the brown people on the planet are secretly working together.

Thing is, she actually came out and said in the first paragraph that she knew the kidnappers were Albanians. I can only assume that, by the time she reached the second paragraph, the part of her brain that is able to process objective facts had once again lost control and she describes them as, "obviously Arabs, who speak Arabic." Uh, no. As someone who saw the movie in the mindset of "Fan of fun action flicks" and not as someone looking for anything at all that advances my racist, eliminationist agenda and worldview, the movie makes it extremely, absolutely une-fucking-quivocally clear that the kidnappers are ALBANIANS. In fact, one of the ways that Neeson's character tracks them down is that he identifies the language they are speaking as ALBANIAN. At one point he even hires an Albanian interpreter and uses an Albanian-English dictionary to translate something he heard one of them say.

But hey, they must be Muslims, right? What about the crescent/star tattoos that Debs noticed on their hands? Aren't those the religious symbols of Islam? This might be the conclusion you jump to if, like Debbie, you know as much about Islam as you do about what your natural hair color was all those years ago before you dyed it blond. I'm not an expert on all things Islam but one thing I know about Muslims is that they are not supposed to get tattooed and they are super duper extra doubly not supposed to get tattooed with religious symbols. So what were those tattoos? To answer that, I do what no Big Hollywood writer ever does when trying to answer a question, that being the 30 second Google Search.

*30 seconds later*

DING! It turns out that the moon-star combo is also the symbol of the old Byzantine Empire of which Albania was once a part. The moon symbolizes the goddess Artemis and the star was added later by Christians to symbolize the Virgin Mary. In other words, the tats were not only NOT a proud symbol of their Islamic beliefs but are actually evidence against them being Muslims.

"Not so fast, Mike," you're now thinking, "what about the part where they describe their boss as The Sheikh? Debbie said that Sheikhs are exclusively Muslim and she's only been wrong about six times so far, you know, so this is proof that Taken is a proud right wing screed against the evils of Islamo-evil-whatevers just like Deb-Deb said." First off, their boss was not a Sheikh. The Albanians were working for a sophisticated French gangster who hired them to grab pretty girls for his sex slave auctions. There is a Sheikh who shows up toward the end of the movie but he is not the boss but rather a customer of the slave trader. He must be a Muslim due to Debbie's declaration about Sheikh-Muslim exclusivity so that's one for the Debinator, right? Would anyone be shocked at this point to find out she was wrong about that too? I'll cut Debbie some slack here as the idea that Sheikhs are in fact not exclusive to Islam is very obscure and could only possibly be known to a little known tome of higher learning known as Wikipedia:

While the title can be used religiously by Muslims to designate a learned person, as an Arabic word it is essentially independent of religion. It is notably used by Druze for their religious men, but also by Arab Christians for elder men of stature.

And that, as we say, is that. The anti-Muslim screed that Debbie Schlussel describes exists only in her fervid, racist imagination. If this is ever pointed out to her, her history says that she will most likely switch gears and say that Taken is now an example of Islam-loving Hollywood political correctness. If that happens, we can all point out that the movie is not a product of Hollywood but was made in France by Frenchmen. Upon hearing that, she'll say it's an example of the way the French love to coddle all things Muslim even though they recently had a series of Muslim riots there at which point she'll be saying, "Norman, coordinate!" and her brain will explode. We'll all be happier for that.